Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for December 03, 2016

Transcript:

Imagine you have a giant spotlight that you aim at a screen 50 trillion miles away and a trillion miles wide. The spotlights beam is one degree wide, expanding out to reach the width of the screen. You flick your hand in front of the spotlight. Your hand crosses the beam in one second, and the shadow it cast transmits toward the giant screen. The shadow must therefore also cross the trillion mile wide screen in one second. Thus, the shadow moves far faster than the speed of light. Of course, none of the photons go faster than light. Your hand doesn't move faster than light, nor does the screen. That's the difference between real and unreal. Real stuff, like us, is stuck behind a cosmic speed limit. The shadows of reality go as fast as they like. I think I would wiggle my fingers so a giant finger-man would run across the screen. One must imagine sisphus happy.